Article published in «Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes» — March 2013. DOI : 10.4000/crm.12965.[Библиографическая ссылка на печатную версию: ‘The body politic in the social and political thought of Christine de Pizan (abridged version). Part I: reciprocity, hierarchy and political Authority’, Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 24 (2012), pp. 461-83.]Given the status of Christine de Pizan (c.1364-c.1430) as France’s first “woman of letters” and the fame of her defence of women against misogyny, it is hardly surprising that modern scholars should have been keen to demonstrate the continuing “relevance” and “significance” of her thought so that her works are not simply seen as the product of a particular historical situation or cultural epoch but are read so that they may also “continue to speak to us” now as the expression of the views of a writer who was “remarkably enlightened for her times”. Certainly, the rise of women’s history and of feminist literary criticism since the 1970s has meant that Christine’s work has come to enjoy a central place in the canon of late medieval literature.3 At first, given the context in which this most recent revival of interest in her work took place, scholars were most interested in those of her texts, such as the Livre de la cité des dames (1405) and the Livre des trois vertus (1405), in which Christine offered a defence of women against the misogyny of her time, and in those of her writings, such as the Livre de l’advision Cristine (1405-6), which could be read autobiographically. However, in recent years, increasing attention has been paid to those aspects of Christine’s work which had originally attracted the notice of 19th- and early 20th-century
scholars, namely her political theory and her engagement with contemporary political events.
